RSS reader: Akregator vs Liferea, and who won

Once upon a time I was using the Firefox live bookmarks to read my RSS feeds. I was young and knew nothing back then. I was content with visiting the folder holding the bookmarks once in a while and see if anything caught my eye. Ah, those days. What I wouldn’t give to be a free man again, slave to the feed no more.

Alas, it was not to be. I gave in to the dark side. I got myself a proper RSS reader. I was never the same again.

1. What I want from my RSS reader

For one thing, I started installing and comparing RSS readers, worried that I may not be getting the best there is. And I got really picky. I drew up a list of demands. It went like this:

• It must be fast.
• It must allow me to tell certain feeds to not show up as unread. I have a lot of feeds and I’m not fond of seeing “20000 unread items”.
• It must keep past news items forever.
• It must search through them, and the search must be fast and sensible.
• Must allow me to open up items using the browser of choice.
• Gotta have a tray icon and start minimized.
• Being able to configure minimum font size and choosing the fonts is a serious bonus.

2. Meet the contenders

I must mention, for the sake of completeness, that I’ve tried quite a few other RSS readers. I’ve thrown aside console readers and stuff using resource-hungry platforms (XUL, Java or .NET). I’ve also passed on stuff that it just not up to polish yet (like Blam or Straw) as well as stuff that is too rudimentary (like RSSyl, a plugin for Claws-Mail). I’ve also had it with RSS readers inside the browser — my Firefox is chock-full of extensions as it is and it’s starting to resemble a kitchen sink.

I narrowed the contest down to two: Akregator (1.2.9) and Liferea (1.4.12). Let’s learn some things about them.

2.1. The good,…

First, let’s give credit where it’s due and point out things that both of these RSS readers do right.

• OPML import and export.
• Sensible screen layout and three view modes (normal, widescreen and combined) to pick from.
• They render the posts nicely as HTML.
• Past items can be archived indefinitely.
• Tray icon and the ability to start minimized (you have to use a command line parameter for that, though).
• You can define your browser of choice, to open full posts with. Which is nice because I wanted to use this script I made.
• The tray icon tells you when there are unread items. Akregator shows the number whereas Liferea changes the color of the icon. Both use the tooltip to show the number.
• The feeds use the favicon from the website.
• Items can be marked read/unread, flagged as important and deleted.
• Modify the font size in the post body on the fly.
• You can choose the update interval and override it per/feed. Speaking of which, you can change individual feed settings, such as name, archival period and so on. You can also mark individual feeds as “do not update”.
• Akregator lets you abort feed updates. Liferea has an offline mode, where no updates are made.

2.2. …The bad,…

Now we turn to things that aren’t so nice. Both RSS readers have their rough spots and there are many places where one of them did things a little better than the other.

• Both readers can open several tabs, for instance they can open an item in a tab. But Akgregator always shows the tab bar, even when only the main tab is open. It eats into my screen space. Liferea only shows it once there are at least two tabs. Since I never open items in tabs, I constantly resent Akgregator’s abuse of my screen space.
• Liferea has these really smart search folders, where you can define your own criteria. Such as “show me all flagged items” or “show me items that contain a certain text”. By contrast, it took me a little while to figure out how to do the same in Akgregator: it has a selector on the quick-search bar. Which bar is shown by default, true. Except I have hidden it, thinking I’d use Control+F and didn’t notice I’d miss an important feature. Then I discovered that the Control+F search doesn’t produce any results, while the search-bar does. So I have to see, and use, the search bar anyway. More wasted screen space.
• The search in Liferea is dumb. It always searches ALL the feeds. Akregator starts only from the folder you’re in and goes down, recursively.
• No clear winner in the graphics design department. Anyway, everybody’s going to be biased, since it’s a Gnome/GTK+ vs a Qt/KDE thing. I think Liferea looks more stylish. On the other hand, Akregator has some nice little details: the unread number next to the feed name is done in blue, not black, and while Liferea uses bold to show unread items, Akregator uses blue to show them and also red to show recent unread items. And doesn’t use bold for that, which lets me see more of the item title.
• Liferea’s toolbar is actually useful. Can’t say the same about Akregator, who is severely handicapped by the fact that most tools on it, save for three or four, have no icon assigned and fall back to the same default icon. Granted, you can fix this yourself since KDE apps allow you to customize toolbars extensively and easily; but it won’t be exactly obvious to non-KDE veterans.
• Liferea can retrieve comments associated with a feed item and append them to the post body, which is very useful for blogs. Akregator cannot.
• The Liferea menus actually make sense. They seem to have designed them from the ground up in the best way befitting an RSS reader. The Akgregator menus are decent, but follow classic application (and KDE) arrangements, which makes them less than perfect.
• Liferea lets you manually refresh the feed favicons. Akregator doesn’t, so it seems like you’re stuck with whatever icons you got first.
• For some reason, after being minimized to tray, Akregator insists on opening at this weird small size instead of remembering its previous size. It happens every time: I minimize it, open it up again, it’s gone small and crimped. I use Blackbox as the window manager — I suspect it has something to do with that. Bad Akregator. I had to resort to a Devil’s Pie script to fix this:
  

  (if
    (and
      (is (window_class) "Akregator")
      (contains (application_name) "Akregator")
      (contains (window_name) "Akregator")
    )
    (maximize)
  )

2.3. …And the ugly

That’s about it for the nice stuff. Here’s comes the ugly:

• Liferea is SLOW. Searching, entering a folder, give big delays. It has these moments when it freezes up, eats up CPU and does God knows what. I thought it’s because it keeps the data in XML files but no, it looks like Liferea switched to SQLite since 1.3. So I don’t know what’s up with that. Akregator’s search is practically instantaneous and so is entering a folder — entering the root folder and seeing all the feeds is the only place that gives a small detectable delay.
• Doesn’t have an option to mark items read automatically as they come in. It does have an option to stop a feed from updating, which is nice, and Akgregator has it too. But between these two options, the one I want most is the automatic read marker. What this means is that, with Liferea, if I want to put aside feeds I seldom read, I gotta mark them “do not update”. Otherwise I get that “20000 unread items” thing. Whereas in Akgregator I still get all the new items, I just don’t have to look at them if I don’t want to.
• Liferea won’t let you pick fonts and define a minimum size font. It allows you to change font size on the fly, but won’t remember it later. And it gives fonts in the feed precedence over your theme.
• The tray icon click behaviour in Liferea is dumb. If Liferea is not hidden and you click on the tray icon, it hides. Ah, but it disregards the fact that Liferea may be hidden behind other windows (not focused) or on another workspace. So you don’t see Liferea anywhere, you click the icon, and you still don’t see Liferea anywhere. You need to click once more for it to show. Akgregator does the smart thing: if the window is obscured or on another desktop, clicking the tray icon will bring it forth. This is the right thing to do. When I click the icon and the reader is not already in front of my eyes, chances are I want to see it, not hide it.
• Liferea frequently messes up the state of the feed items when killed by a shutdown (which happens all the time). I look at it after a bootup and find items I’ve read marked unread or feeds reporting bogus number of unread items. Gotta do a manual “mark all as read” to fix it.

3. Who won and why, in a nutshell

Bottom line, I decided I’d go with Akregator. It has some rough spots but it does the essential stuff right: it’s fast, reliable, lets you configure fonts, does search properly and lets you ignore certain feeds but still updates them.

Liferea looks better, has a much better interface (toolbar, menus, search folders); but it’s resource hungry, slow, and failed me by missing the options I wanted most.

Both RSS readers are very good otherwise and, provided the trouble they gave me was specific to my setup or my incompetence, or that you don’t care about the same features that I do, you’ll be able to use either of them with joy.

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